I think most of you know from the announcement of this series of seminars and workshops during thesummer, they're entitled 'The Value of Psychotic Experience.' And many people who are interested in anentirely new approach to problems of what have hitherto been called mental health are participating in theseseminars and workshops, and doing something which is extremely dangerous and in a way revolutionary.For this reason:We are living in a world where deviant opinions about religion are no longer dangerous, because no onetakes religion seriously, and therefore you can be like Bishop Pike and question the doctrine of the HolyTrinity, the reality of the virgin birth, and the physical ressurection of Jesus, and still remain a bishop ingood standing. But what you can't get away with today, or at least you have great difficulty in getting awaywith is psychiatric heresy. Because psychiatry is taken seriously, and indeed, I would like to draw a parallelbetween today and the Middle Ages in the respect of this whole question.When we go back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition, we must remember that the professor of theologyat the University of Seville has the same kind of social prestige and intellectual standing that today wouldbe enjoyed by the professor of pathology at Stanford Medical School. And you must bear in mind that thistheologan, like the professor of pathology today, is a man of good will. Intensely interested in humanwelfare. He didn't merely opine; that professor of theology KNEW that anybody who had heretical religiousviews would suffer everlasting agony of the most apalling kind. And some of you should read theimaginative descriptions of the sufferings of Hell, written not only in the Middle Ages, but in quite recenttimes by men of intense intellectual acumen. And therefore out of real merciful motivation, the Inquisitorsthought that it was the best thing they could do to torture heresy out of those who held it. Worse still, heresywas infectious, and would contaminate other people and put them in this immortal danger. And so with thebest motivations imaginable, the used the thumbscrew, the rack, the iron maiden, the leaded cat-of-nine-tails, and finally the stake to get these people to come to their senses, because nothing else seemed to beavailable.Today, serious heresy, and rather peculiarly in the United States, is a deviant state of consciousness. Not so much deviant opinions as having a kind of experience which isdifferent from 'regular' experience. And as Ronald Lang, who is going to participate in thisseries, has so well pointed out, we are taught what experiences are permissable in the sameway we are taught what gestures, what manners, what behavior is permissable and sociallyacceptable. And therefore, if a person has so-called 'strange' experiences, and endeavors tocommunicate these experiences--because naturally one talks about what one feels--andendeavors to communicate these experiences to other people, he is looked at in a very oddway and asked 'are you feeling all right?' Because people feel distinctly uncomfortable whenthe realize they are in the presence of someone who is experiencing the world in a ratherdifferent way from themselves. They call in question as to whether this person is indeedhuman. They look like a human being, but because the state of experience is so different, youwonder whether they really are. And you get the kind of--the same kind of queasy feeling

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inside as you would get if, for the sake of example, you were to encounter a very beautifulgirl, very formally dressed, and you were introduced, and in order to shake hands, sheremoved her glove, and you found in your hand the claw of a large bird. That would bespooky, wouldn't it?Or let's suppose that you were looking at a rose. And you looked down in the middle where the petals areclosed, and you suddenly saw them open like lips, and the rose addressed you and said 'good morning.' Youwould feel something uncanny was going on. And in rather the same way, in an every day kind of circumstance, when you are sitting in a bar drinking, and you find you have a drunk next to you. And hetells you, 'undistinguishable drunken ranting' and you sort of move your stool a little ways away from thisman, because he's become in some way what we mean by nonhuman. Now, we understand the drunk; weknow what's the matter with him, and it'll wear off. But when quite unaccountably, a person givesrepresentation that he's suddenly got the feeling that he's living in backwards time, or that everybody seemsto be separated from him by a huge sheet of glass. Or that he's suddenly seeing everything in unbelievablydetailed moving colors. We say, 'well that's not normal. Therefore there must be something wrong withyou.' And the fact that we have such an enormous percentage of the population of this country in mentalinstitutions is a thing we may have to look at from a very different point of view, not that there may be ahigh incidence of mental sickness, but that there may be a high incidence of intolerance of variations of consciousness.Now in Arabic countries, where the Islamic religion prevails, a person whom we would define as mentallyderanged is regarded with a certain respect. The village idiot is looked upon with reverence because it issaid his soul is not with his body, it is with Allah. And because his soul is with Allah, you must respect thisbody and care for it, not as something that is to be sort of swept away and put out of sight, but as somethingof a reminder that a man can still be living on Earth while his soul is in Heaven. Very diffent point of view.Also in India, there is a certain difference in attitude to people who would be called nuts, because there is apoem--an ancient poem of the Hindus-- which says 'sometimes naked, sometimes mad, now's a scholar,now's a fool, thus they appear on Earth as free men.'But you see, we in our attitude to this sort of behavior, which is essentially in its first inception harmless,these people are talking what we regard to be nonsense. And to be experienced in nonsense. We feelthreatened by that, because we are not secure in ourselves. A very secure person can adapt himself withamazing speed to different kinds of communciation. In foreign countries, for example, where you don'tspeak the language of the people you are staying with, if you don't feel ashamed of this, you can set up anenormous degree of communication with other people through gesture and even something most surprising,people can communicate with each other by simply talking. You can get a lot across to people by talkingintelligent nonsense, by, as it were, imitating a foreign language; speaking like it sounds. You cancommunicate feeligns, emotions, like and dislike of this, that and the other; very simply. But if you are rigidand are not willing to do this type of playing, then you feel threatened by anybody who communicates withyou in a funny way. And so this rigidity sets up a kind of vicious circle. The minute, in other words,someone makes an unusual communciation to you about an unusual state of consciousness, and you backoff, the individual wonders 'is there something wrong with me? I don't seem to be understood by anyone.'Or he may wonder 'what's going on? Has everybody else suddenly gone crazy?' And then if he feels that hegets frightened, and to the degree that he gets more frightened, he gets more defensive, and eventually landup with being catatonic, which is a person who simply doesn't move. And so then what we do is we whifflehim off to an institution, where he is captured by the inquisitors. This is a very special priesthood. And theyhave all the special marks that priesthoods have always had. They have a special vestment. Like theCatholic priest at mass wears a *, the mental doctor, like every physician, wears a long white coat, and maycarry something that corresponds, shall we say, so a stole, which is a stethescope around his neck. He willthen, under his authority, which is often in total defience of every conceivable civil liberty, will incarcerate

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this incomprehensible person, and as Lang has pointed out, he undergoes a ritual of dehumanization. Andhe's put away. And because the hospitals are so crowded with people of this kind, he's going to get verylittle attention. And it's very difficult to know, when you get attention, how to work with it.You get into this Kafka-esque situation which you get, say, in the state of California, if you are sent to suchan institute as Vacaville prison, which is as you drive on the highway from San Francisco to Sacramento,you will encounter Vacaville about halfway between. You will see a great sign which will say 'CaliforniaState Medical Facility.' The state of California is famous for circumlocution. When you go underneath alow bridge, instead of saying 'Low Bridge,' it says 'Impaired Vertical Clearance.' Or when you're going tocross a toll bridge, instead of saying, plainly, 'Toll Bridge,' it says 'Entering Vehicular Crossing.' And whenit should be saying, plainly, 'Prison,' it says either 'California State Medical Facility,' or 'California StateCorrectional Facility,' as it does as Soledad. Now Vacaville is a place where people get sent on what theycall a one- to ten-year sentence. And there is a supervising psychiatric medical sort of social service staff there, who examine the inmates once in a while because they have such a large number. It's a maximumsecurity prison, much more ringed around with defences than even San Quentin. I went there to lecture tothe inmates some time ago. They wanted someone to talk to them about meditation and yoga, and one of theinmates took me aside--a very clean-cut all-American boy. And he had been put in there probably forsmoking pot; I'm not absolutely sure in my memory what the offense was. He said 'You know, I am verypuzzled about this place. I really want to go straight and get out and get a job and live like an ordinaryperson.' He said 'I think they don't know how to go about it. I've just been refused release; I went up beforethe committee; I talked to them. But I don't know what the rules of the game are. And incidentally, themembers of the committee don't either.'So we have these situation, you see, of confusion. So that when a person goes into a mental hospital andfeels first of all perhaps that he should try to sort himself out and talk reasonably with the physician. Thereis introduced into the communications system between them a fundamental element of fear and mistrust.Because I could talk to any individual if I were malicious and interpret every sane remark you make assomething deeply sinister; that would simply exhibit my own paranoia. And the psychiatrist can very easilyget paranoid, because the system he is asked to represent, officially is paranoid. I talked with a psychiatristin England just a few weeks ago. One of the most charming women I've come across, an older woman, veryintelligent, quite beautiful, very reasonable. And she was discussing with me the problem of the LSDpsychosis. I asked her what sort of treatments they were using, and all sorts of questions about that, and sheappeared at first to be a little on the defensive about it. We got onto the subject of the experience of what isofficially called 'depersonalization,' where you feel that you and your experience--your sensory experience--that is to say all that you do experience: the people, the things, the animals, the buildings around you--thatit's all one. I said 'do you call this a hallucination? After all,' I said, 'it fits the facts of science, of biophysics,of ecology, of biology, and much better than our ordinary normal experience fits it.' She said 'that's not myproblem.' She said 'that may be true, but I am employed by a society which feels that it ought to maintain acertain average kind of normal experience, and my job is to restore people to what society considers normalconsciousness. I have no alternative but to leave it at that.'So, then. When someone is introduced into this situation, and it's very difficult to get attention, you feelterrified. The mental hospital, often in its very architecture, suggests some of the great visions of madness,of-- You know that feeling of-- The corridors of the mind. If you got lost in a maze and you couldn't getback. You're not quite sure who you are, or whether your father and mother are your real father and mother,or whether in the next ten minutes you're still going to remember how to speak English. You feel very lost.And the mental hospital in its architecture and everything represents that situation. Endless corridors, all thesame. Which one are you in? Where are you? Will you ever get out? And it goes on monotonously, dayafter day after day after day after day. And someone who talks to you occasionally doesn't have a straightlook in his eye. He doesn't see you as quite human. He looks at you as if you're weird. What are you to do?